16 THE WEEKEND NEOS KOSMOS | SATURDAY 16 JANUARY 2016 DIGITAL.NEOSKOSMOS.COM ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT George Miller enters the Oscars race The Greek Australian director a contender for an Academy Award, as Mad Max: Fury Road is honoured by the Producer’s Guild of America For the international film industry January is, first and foremost, awards season, with a series of ceremonies honouring the best of the crop. One after the other, the awards of the season build up excitement for the industry's most significant: the Academy Awards. So far, George Miller has been riding the wave, as it seems that his latest venture, Mad Max: Fury Road, will find its way into the final top 10 list. Last Tuesday, the post-apocalyptic action film gained a nomination for the Producers Guild Of America awards, considered one of the major indicators of the nominees for and winners of the best picture Oscar. In the past eight years alone, the PGA winner has indeed gone on to win the Acadamy Award. If this proves to be the case again, this won't be the first time the Greek Australian director finds himself at the Oscars. Miller has already won an Academy Award for best animated feature with Happy Feet in 2007 and has been nominated for three others: Babe (best picture, best adapted screenplay) and Lorenzo's Oil (best original screenplay). Not bad for a former Sydney emergency room doctor. The full list of the PGA nominees for best picture are: The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Ex Machina, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Sicario, Spotlight and Straight Outta Compton. The winners will be announced on January 23. Oscar nominations are announced next week and its winners are revealed on February 28. Hope dies last (or so an old Greek saying goes) How a Greek Australian production from Drama ended up at the Windows on Europe Film Festival Greek filmmakers named in Top 10 movies of 2015 A panel of six experts on behalf of Fairfax Media's The Age has featured Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster in its list of Top 10 movies of 2015. The panel, which includes critics Paul Byrnes, Jake Wilson and Philippa Hawker, and film writers Karl Quinn, Stephanie Bunbury and Garry Maddox, saw the Irish production featured at number six ahead of Amy, Far From Men, Mommy, and Clouds of Sils Maria. The film, starring Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and John C. Reilly, is set in the near future, where people found not to be in a relationship are sent to an institution where they are forced to find a suitable partner over the course of 45 days. If unsuccessful they face being transformed into animals. The interesting and at times comedic concept has continued to receive rave reviews, adding nominations and awards to its name from the British Independent Film Awards, Cannes Film Festival, European Film Awards and the London Critics Circle Film Awards, among others. While arriving at the final Top 10 saw the panellists in dispute, according to The Age, only one film received a vote from each: Greek American George Miller's Mad Max: Fury Road, topping the list at number one. Other films featuring on the list were Joy, The Assassin, Leviathan and Birdman. "Joanna's story is an urban myth in my hometown," the director of the film, Panagiotis Fafoutis, tells Neos Kosmos by email, a week before his short is ready for projection at the Bondi Pavilion. "She was a real woman who waited all her life for her fiancée. I got inspired by this story and brought it into the now, as I saw Joanna in parallel with Greece itself, waiting for her saviour to come from the outside," Fafoutis adds. Joanna is a nine-minute film directed by Panagiotis Fafoutis that reflects on habit, loss and hope. A Greek Australian of sorts itself, Joanna is an independent production made by Fafoutis' company Guanaco films, Oxymoron Films and Aussie Ficino Films, with Tia Spanos and Antonis Tsonis based in Melbourne. Filmed in the director's home town of Patras "the western door of Greece to Europe", as Fafoutis describes it, three days was all it took to complete the shoot. The film comes to Australia as part of the Windows on Europe Film Festival, partnering with Flickerfest in Bondi, Sydney for 2016, having first premiered in the home of the European Union itself - Brussels Film Festival - in April 2015. Since then the director tells us that Joanna has travelled to Italy, winning the prize for best actress at the Capalbio Film Festival, then France, Germany, Albania, Greece - where the short film won the best music and sound at the Drama Film Festival - and to Cyprus. The Europe-wide art channel arte TV is screening Joanna in France and Germany at the moment. Living by the sea is a daily reality for Fafoutis and so he associates ports as being "places of hope, you can always leave and can always return", he says. "Every day I have this motto 'They will not beat us, we will beat them! Now that my 20-day-old daughter exists I become more optimistic only by looking at her and her mother," the new father enthuses. Greeks have a saying that goes ‘hope is always the last sentiment to die’, as in 'there's always hope'. Fafoutis looks at culture as being a necessary and last vestige of hope. "If you have a good foundation in culture, this reflects on you as a person. "Unfortunately in Greece today culture is on the side and people are getting poorer mentally and emotionally ..." The 10th edition of the Windows on Europe Film Festival will run as part of the Flickerfest International Short Film Festival on Thursday 14 January in two programs, at 6.30 pm and 8.45 pm. There are 17 short films being screened from 17 of the European Union member states including Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, From the film Joanna by Panagiotis Fafoutis, with Yvoni Maltezou. Janna Ji Wonders reads Joanna’s story. Joanna descends to the port daily to find love. Inspired by an urban myth, one woman’s story could be a country’s tale. France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom, and the event is in partnership with the European Union Award-winning Greek skies A time-lapse video capturing the Greek sky in all its glory has taken out the Best of the Fest award in Hollywood. The entry, which goes for the duration of six minutes and 16 seconds in total, was awarded at the Hollywood International Independent Documentary Awards (HIIDA) last month. Created by Panagiotis Filippou, the filmmaker says he created the video as a dedication to his late father, who died of cancer. "Dad, the video is ready, I know you are not here to see it together, but forgive me I cannot type ‘in memory of’ for you ... cause you never left me and you never will. Dad the video is you, you are the Greek Skies," are the touching words written by Filippou. He says the film took 365 days, 55,000 photos, 825 hours of shooting photos, 8,400 km, 650 hours of editing and countless hours of prayer to create the award-winning video. Source: Tornos News eo. Delegation in Australia. For further details please see eeas.europa.eu/delegations/ australia/index_en.htm Ticketing - flickerfest.com. au/programme-2016/